What's Hot: Good and loud audio, new Bluetooth version, voice command in different languages and very good battery life.

What's Not: Small bugs that need update from a firmware.

SuperTooth has completely updated its Bluetooth car kit offering from its SuperTooth Buddy to the new SuperTooth HD. The new SuperTooth HD in-car speaker has Bluetooth 3.0, two powerful speakers, dual mic noise cancelling and integration with Dial2Do service that can read your messages to you and allows you to send messages and entering social networking entries via voice. The SuperTooth HD is very easy to use thanks to the voice instructions and it has very good battery life.

Design

The new SuperTooth HD Bluetooth car kit also has a completely new design from their last Bluetooth car kit. The SuperTooth HD has a large multi-function knob on the front that can answer calls, end calls, activate voice dialing and more very easily. The knob also works as a volume dialer. Below the knob are two LED lights for Bluetooth and battery status, power on/off button and the HandsFree Assistant button that dials into HFA line when you press it.

Under the casing, the SuperTooth HD has two loud speakers that channel the sound through the speaker grill. When you clip the car kit on your sun visor, the speaker grill faces the windshield and lets the sound spread in front of you when you sit in the driver seat. The SuperTooth HD has a microUSB port on the side for charging and syncing. The car kit has two microphones on each end of the unit for noise cancelling. As with the last Bluetooth car kit, the SuperTooth HD has two powerful magnets on the back to secure the car kit to a metal clip.

Pairing and Features

The SuperTooth HD has Bluetooth 3.0 with support for Hands-Free and A2DP/AVRCP for voice calls and stereo audio streaming. With the updated version of Bluetooth, the car kit supports auto pairing, multi-pairing as well as multiPoint which allows the car kit to connect with two devices simultaneously. One nice thing about having Bluetooth v3.0 for multiPoint feature is that the car kit keeps connection with two devices at all times even during a call. The car kit puts itself in pairing mode when you turn it on, you can use your phone to pair with it. The pairing process is very easy thanks to the voice instructions, but multi-pairing requires you to turn off the last phone you paired with the car kit in order to put car kit into pairing mode. We tested it with several phones including the iPhone 4, Motorola XPRT, Samsung Exhibit 4G and more, and found the car kit paired with all easily.

One of the biggest features in new Bluetooth Hands-free speakers is the voice instruction/voice command built-in. The SuperTooth HD offers more options with this feature compared to other car kits like the Jabra Freeway. You can choose from 6 languages (British English and American English count as two languages) for Text to Speech; 3 languages (English, French and Spanish) for Hands-Free Assistant and 2 languages (English and French) for voice command. The car kit supports Hands-free profile features such as last number redialing, rejecting calls, 3-way calling as well as using voice command on your phone.

The SuperTooth HD car speaker comes with built-in memory and will automatically download your phonebook to the car kit after you paired it with your phone. It takes a few minutes to download 500 contacts, and it can announce caller?s name or number if a caller is in your address book. The car kit has a good speed when it announces caller ID so that you have enough time to answer and reject the call. The built-in voice command includes answer call, reject call, ignore call as well as check battery, redial last number, call voice mail, call emergency, call home or office. Voice command worked smoothly in our tests.

SuperTooth teamed up with Dial2Do to offer what Dial2Do calls ? HandsFree Assistant? features. You can press the HFA button on the SuperTooth car kit to connect to the HFA line to check SMS and email (for Android and BlacBerry smartphones only), Facebook and Twitter messages and notes. Before you can do this, you will need to go onto Dial2Do web site to set up your account, and the process is easy enough. For the entire list of features of Dial2Do check out This page. It?s very handy to have your messages right there in your car while you are driving, but we found it was still a bit distracting as you do need to think about the messages you hear and compose.

Voice Quality and Range

The SuperTooth HD is very loud for a small unit thanks to the two built-in speakers with 5.4 watts class D amplifier. The sound isn?t as full as the Jabra Freeway which has three speakers, but it?s absolutely loud enough and you should have no trouble hearing it while driving on a highway. Voice call, GPS instructions and Text to Speech content sound loud and quite clear. And thanks to the dual mic and DSP, the SuperTooth HD has very nice outgoing audio. In our voice quality tests with several phones, the SuperTooth HD had clear outgoing audio and very loud incoming audio on all phones.

We also tested stereo audio streaming, and the SuperTooth HD streamed music, GPS instructions, and system sound nicely. The car kit has about 20 feet of range before it looses its connection to the phone.

Battery Life

The SuperTooth HD has a built-in rechargeable Lithium Ion battery that has very good battery life. The car kit lasted us for 3 weeks with moderate talk and music streaming and a few trips with GPS instructions turned on. The claimed talk time is 20 hours continuously and claimed standby is over 40 days. The car kit comes with an in-vehicle DC adapter and as well as a USB cable which you can use to charge the unit either in your car or using your computer. It takes about 3 hours to fully charge the unit.

Conclusion

We like the SuperTooth HD for its new version of Bluetooth v3.0 along with the more advanced pairing and connection features, its loud speaker and effective DSP and dual mic, and its voice instructions coming in different languages. The SuperTooth HD has excellent battery life, good audio quality and for those who want to get distracted while driving, it offers Text to Speech features for you to send and check messages in your SMS, email as well as social networking. The SuperTooth HD has some minor bugs, such as it kills the Mac Bluetooth when charging, and hopefully these minor issues will be address in future firmware updates.